Bible and Theology

October 31, 2006

The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 5

This post examines Peter Martyr Vermigli’s understanding of natural law, while Part 6 will take up the natural-law thinking of Jerome Zanchi, Martyr’s former student and colleague. Martyr was born in Florence in 1499, entered the Augustinian Canons, and took a doctorate in theology at the leading center of Renaissance Aristotelianism, the University of Padua. Continue Reading...

October 31, 2006

What is Truth!

Hugh Hewitt interviewed Andrew Sullivan on the radio last week about Sullivan’s book, The Conservative Soul: How We Lost It, How to Get It Back. Discussing the value of various figures throughout history as moral heroes, Sullivan speaks of “the great question that Pilate asked, what is truth? Continue Reading...

October 24, 2006

The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 4

As promised in Part 3, this post will begin a discussion of natural law in the thought of the Reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562), but first I want to touch on the broader issue of natural law in the context of Reformation theology. Continue Reading...

October 24, 2006

Faithfulness in Biblical Interpretation

I ran across the following quote from Søren Kierkegaard recently (HT: the evangelical outpost): The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. Continue Reading...

October 23, 2006

Power

Zenit published the following this weekend, a commentary by Capuchin Father Raniero Cantalamessa on this Sunday’s liturgical readings (Isaiah 53:2a.,3a.,10-11; Hebrews 4:14-16; Mark 10:35-45). Well worth the read. After the Gospel on riches, this Sunday’s Gospel gives us Christ’s judgment on another of the great idols of the world: power. Continue Reading...

October 16, 2006

The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 3

As I mentioned in Part 2, a common stereotype of Protestant ethics is that it is wedded to nominalism. While this may be true for some (particularly modern) Protestant ethicists, it is false for Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi, two older Reformed moral theologians. Continue Reading...

October 12, 2006

Distorting the Bible, Flattening out Morality

Over at Jim Wallis’ Beliefnet blog, Ron Sider reflects on his interpretation of the landmark text, “For the Health of the Nation: An Evangelical Call to Civic Responsibility,” issued by the National Association of Evangelicals. Continue Reading...

October 09, 2006

The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 2

As I mentioned in Part 1 of this series, my aim is to probe the natural-law doctrines of only a few influential sixteenth-century Protestant theologians. Some, such as John Calvin, may already be familiar to you, while others, such as Peter Martyr Vermigli (known as Martyr) and Jerome Zanchi, may be entirely new. Continue Reading...

October 03, 2006

Be Careful What You Wish For

Reading through the narrative of king Saul in 1 Samuel, it occurs to me that it is in part an object lesson of Lord Acton’s dictum about the corrupting influence of power, in this case political. Continue Reading...

September 25, 2006

The Catholicity of the Reformation: Musings on Reason, Will, and Natural Law, Part 1

This post will introduce what I intend to be an extended series concerned with recovering and reviving the catholicity of Protestant ethics. Protestant catholicity? Isn’t this an oxymoron? It may come as a surprise in light of a common stereotype of Protestant theology, but the older Protestant understanding of reason, the divine will, and natural law actually provided a bulwark against the notion of a capricious God, unbounded by truth and goodness, as Pope Benedict recently pointed out in relation to Islam’s understanding of God. Continue Reading...

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